t easily stir emotion, and, therefore, do not easily
become material for art whose function it is to express and communicate
emotion. Particular qualities, like love, honour, faith, may and _do_
stir emotion; and certain bundles of qualities like, for example,
motherhood tend towards personification; but the normal class label like
horse, man, triangle does not easily become material for art; it remains
a practical utility for science.

The abstractions, the class-names of science are in this respect quite
different from those other abstractions or unrealities already
studied--the gods of primitive religion. The very term we use shows
this. _Abstractions_ are things, qualities, _dragged away_ consciously
by the intellect, from actual things objectively existing. The primitive
gods are personifications--_i.e._ collective emotions taking shape in
imagined form. Dionysos has no more actual, objective existence than the
abstract horse. But the god Dionysos was not made by the intellect for
practical convenience, he was begotten by emotion, and, therefore, he
re-begets it. He and all the other gods are, therefore, the proper
material for art; he is, indeed, one of the earliest forms of art. The
abstract horse, on the other hand, is the outcome of reflection. We
must honour him as of quite extraordinary use for the purposes of
practical life, but he leaves us cold and, by the artist, is best
neglected.

* * * * *

There remains the relation of Art to Religion.[56] By now, it may be
hoped, this relation is transparently clear. The whole object of the
present book has been to show how primitive art grew out of ritual, how
art is in fact but a later and more sublimated, more detached form of
ritual. We saw further that the primitive gods themselves were but
projections or, if we like it better, personifications of the rite. They
arose straight out of it.

Now we say advisedly "primitive gods," and this with no intention of
obscurantism. The god of later days, the unknown source of life, the
unresolved mystery of the world, is not begotten of a rite, is not,
essentially not, the occasion or object of art. With his relation to
art--which is indeed practically non-existent--we have nothing to do. Of
the other gods we may safely say that not only are they objects of art,
they are its prime material; in a word, primitive theology is an early
stage in the formation of art. Each primitive god, like th